The Kings Of The F**King Sea

Dan Boehl, with Images by Jonathan Marshall

More a play or unfilmable film than a book of poems, more a wish than a journey, Kings of the F**king Sea opens with a prologue to guide the reader.

Kings of the F**king Sea unfolds to reveal a world that exists on the edge of society but is subservient to it, a world of artists, poets, merchants, sailors, and soldiers who break themselves against the sea and the vast unknowable opportunity it represents. As one poem goes, “The world invents, the sea discloses, and irony isn't a necessary tool for successful men." On the sea, as in art, some make it and others die nameless, destitute of love, forgotten.

Conceived by poet Dan Boehl and artist Jonathan Marshall, Kings of the F**king Sea is the culmination of their four-year friendship and collaboration. The book features full-color images of Marshall's drawings, paintings, collages, and sculptures, working in tandem with the poems to flesh out a beautiful, broken, psychedelic, and necessary tale of artist expression and its failure.

What People Are Saying

Zachary Schomburg

I often have a difficult time distinguishing between the memories of my childhood nightmares, the movie Time Bandits, and now Kings of the F**king Sea. At the heart of each is an unrecoverable distance from home. In Dan Boehl's poems, the sea is not home. If we stay on it, we will eventually drown in it, but there is nothing we can do. His poems are unforgivably wise. Like the sea, they are an unafraid mirror. And though they remind us it's always too late–that our adventure is a constant failure–their beauty keeps us afloat for just long enough.

CAConrad

“There is no level / in my mind, in other words / the world." Are you about to read this book? I think you must be ready. Dan Boehl's poems are a talisman, a supernatural scaffold over our neglected conscience. Everything happens, and it stings, and is beautiful when it's not awful.

Inside the Book

Reviews

Unfolding like a poetic narrative or modern storytelling, KINGS OF THE F**KING SEA is The Odyssey or Robinson Crusoe, without the castaway or being marooned on a tropical island, of 2011. Easy to finish in one sitting, an active reader will return to the pages again and again to make sense of the historic references, art history icons, and myths that are real and invented. Once I'd finished reading it I found myself flipping back and forth through the prologue, poems, images, notes and acknowledgements trying to connect and inform. This willingness to look again made the poems and in the end my experience reading them even better. In a world filled will news like this past week in Egypt, or past years in Iraq, or past decades in Israel and Palestine, poems and poetry like the one below are still as relevant as ever.

The concept of poet Dan Boehl and visual artist Jonathan Marshall's Kings of the F**king Sea feels like something thought up in an Austin bar after an MFA workshop, between their third and fourth Lone Stars. This isn't necessarily a bad thing. There's an appealing looseness in the execution of the book's idea, which I've mentioned twice now without explaining. Jack Spicer is the captain of a pirate ship whose crew goes by the name in the book's title, and includes Jasper Johns and Robert Motherwell. The Kings face off against Mark Rothko, the captain and sole member of a rival ship called the Cobra Sombrero.

From the Book

La Pendaison

(The Hangman's Tree)

There is a Japanese proverb that says any person who can fold 1000 cranes is granted one wish. This is the part where a crane folds 1000 people. This is the part where the swallow slays the dragon. This is the night. This is the night. 1000 people hang from one tree. There is this part I never told you. Half of those people used to be my neighbors. The other half were my friends.

Map(of the New World)

Remember how smoke

issued from the stacks like the dreams of factories when factories were the dreams of cities and cities were the dreams

of our immigrant parents? There are no factories.The city rises in a cacophony of billboards dreamt for us like the factories and the steam of our orphaned language. Or is there another dream? I dream of the sea like a map of the new world like the whale's wholeness in the water a lung in the wilderness dreaming of what down there? The unimaginable. Picture the city from the harbor. There is no city.There is no whale.